How many robots do you have in your sales team?

The use of marketing automation, predictive BI, artificial intelligence, IoT and service bots has become a standard topic at management and board meetings of companies that are more or less in pace with the evolution of sales and marketing. The way Siri answers your questions on your iPhone will increasingly become standard practice for the way customers will be answered when they use the chat function on your website or send and e-mail to your company.

Automate your selling process with robots

Amelia, an application of IP-Soft has the capability of uploading all your manuals and all your ever registered frequently asked questions. Translate all this in 40 languages. Detect context in sentences in order to provide the correct answer. And learn from interactions with customers and human colleagues to get better every day. Putting Amelia in place still requires a significant investment but as with all technology more affordable versions will become available over time. Similar tools are available to prepare sales calls and marketing messages or even to follow-up on the productivity of your field sales team.

Automating part of the customer journey and qualification of leads via marketing automation is already standard in most business. For a couple of hundreds of Euros you can achieve massive time savings and gather information on customer behaviour that – even with unlimited resources – could never be tracked and computed as fast as is the case with tools such as HubSpot, Pardot, Sales Manago or Marketo. The future of organisations – and the future of sales, marketing and customer service – will be a future where humans and robots will work alongside.

In the US HR and legal departments are already drafting policies to regulate the interactions between man and machine. This will make sexually tinted challenging of Siri, Amelia or Echo an offence but at the same time demonstrates that the future is happening today.

Be disruptive: work with robots!

In our Disruptive Selling projects we systematically include the use of automation and robots in every equation. This results in very interesting outcomes.

Many jobs can be handled faster and better by robots. Not just operational tasks but also some areas of performance management and even coaching and motivation. So the question how many robots on your sales team will become pretty standard in the near future. The question of how many robots in your management team or on your board will soon follow.

If you are in sales, marketing or customer service it is imperative that you understand how robots work and how artificial intelligence is different from human intelligence. This way you will be able to find out where humans can still outperform robots and you will be able to participate in the redesign of your organisation that may come in the following years. Singularity is indeed near, so be prepared!